


You're Dead (and Outta This World)

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Drowning, F/M, First Kiss, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Humor, Immortality, M/M, Mild Gore, Post-Season/Series 02, Swearing, Vampire Slayer(s), and a whole lot of himbo appreciation, if any of the characters seem particularly idiotic i promise you i'm channeling my own self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:01:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28885803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “Holyshit!” shouts the EMT at his side. His partner on the other side of the gurney--the other side of thebody bag--follows up with a well-deservedholy fuckand stumbles backward over her boots to sag against the back of the open ambulance.“I’m fine, I’m fine, oh God, I’m sorry,” Guillermo babbles. His knees are trembling. He wriggles out of the body bag and hops to his feet, feeling like his legs are a cross between jello and underbaked macaroons, and he repeats his litany of apologies as he bounces from one foot to another to restore circulation.Pain shoots through his joints from the roots of his toes. He ignores it, instead pivoting his head from side to side wildly seeking the detritus of his phone and groceries.“Sir!Sir!You were--sir, please get back here! You weredead!”“Not today, sorry!”--Or: 3 times Guillermo came back from the dead, and 1 time Nandor was there to see it.
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless, Laszlo Cravensworth/Nadja
Comments: 21
Kudos: 82





	You're Dead (and Outta This World)

**Author's Note:**

> So i woke up in the dead of night sometime last week with this _fantastic_ idea of Guillermo not realizing until he's almost 30 years old that he's some kind of immortal, unkillable vamp-slaying machine because of his Van Helsing genes. I've never really decided how I feel about the possibility of Guillermo being turned into a vampire, but he *is* badass as a human with special abilities, so I wanted to explore that a little bit more.
> 
> Also, I needed to sprinkle in my childhood drowning trauma into multiple fics and fandoms at once, so that's what you'll all be getting.
> 
> Content warnings for somewhat detailed descriptions of drowning, falling, car accidents, and stabbing throughout. There's also more swearing in this than I normally include in fics, in keeping with canon characters' vernacular. Also show-typical mentions of blood and dead bodies.
> 
> Enjoy!!

i.

Guillermo isn’t proud of all the nicknames bestowed on him by his middle school companions--friends and foes alike--but he does sometimes reflect with some fondness on the time his D&D group dubbed him the Boy Who Lived and would not shut up about it on or off school grounds. Granted, they could have been a little less derivative (and kept their own Harry Potter hyperfixations a little better under wraps before the school population), but all in all Guillermo thinks it isn’t such a tragedy to be considered some kind of immortal among fellow prepubescent nerds.

It started when his Tío Hector and Tía Carlota came to town for a visit. To this day Guillermo isn’t entirely sure if they really are his aunt and uncle, or if they’re a couple or a brother and sister or just cousins or something, given that the threads of his extremely extended family history tend to get tangled up in his mother’s tales of childhood shenanigans and her usual penchant for mixing up pronouns. None of that mattered at the time, though, because he was twelve years old and what really mattered was that Tía Hector and Tía Carlota were loaded enough to host Hector’s birthday party in a nearby hotel instead of in the cramped fourth-floor apartment that Guillermo and his family shared.

Guillermo remembers emptying out his ceramic elephant bank and counting up half of that year’s saved allowances for swimming trunks. He ditched his math club that afternoon and trundled all the way over to the corner store a few blocks from home to pick out a pair of red and black trunks. Cash clutched in his fist, glasses falling down the slick of his sweat-sheened nose, he purchased his first ever pair of swimming shorts with his heart doing some serious breakdancing moves inside his chest as if he were committing a crime.

He doesn’t remember much between that day and the Saturday that Hector and Carlota were slated to come, except for the reigning tension in the apartment. His mother was all kinds of royally stressed out, stretched thin between her scorched empanadas and the refried beans that she repeatedly lamented to Guillermo’s older sister Vanesa were a tad _too_ refried, and yelling at Guillermo’s father to get the hell out of her kitchen whenever he moodily suggested that Hector and Carlota wouldn’t even need them to be bringing any sort of potluck considering that they were, as aforementioned, (a) loaded and (b) hosting the party and catering at the hotel themselves.

In the haze of it all, Guillermo ended up in some kind of accidental tug-of-war with Vanesa over the saucepan of refried beans, spilling a generous portion down the front of his favorite bathrobe, and Vanesa skipped the usual fit of rage to fly straight into tears, breaking down with one palm shaking against the counter. Guillermo patted her awkwardly on the lower half of her back and shoved a can of ready-made beans in her hand, hissing at her that Mamá wouldn’t even know the difference, and Vanesa reluctantly sniffled, wrestled the can open, and dumped it all into the saucepan again and gave it a quick stir on the stove.

True to his word, Mamá was none the wiser. Even back then, Guillermo had his ways of fixing things first with a knowing tap on his nose, and saving all the panicking later. Typical de la Cruz sibling shenanigans and all that.

Once at the hotel, Guillermo was punched in the chest by the unnatural aromas of the air freshener generously spritzed around. This wasn’t one of those wayside motels that their family sometimes stayed out during summer vacations--the pool was _outdoors_ , there was an actual lifeguard strolling around in some semblance of alertness, and Hector and Carlota had managed to have all the catering set up out at the poolside.

Guillermo ignored the buzz of adults chattering over his head and beelined straight for the pool. He vaguely registered Vanesa’s voice calling him over to ask where he was headed, but he was a man on a mission.

If one thing is to be known about Guillermo, it is that he is a creature of the utmost paradoxes. Throw him unwittingly into a committee of underground Staten Island vampire hunters, and he can improv a cover story with passable confidence. But place him in front of clear and imminent danger, and his first instinct will be somewhere along the lines of _it can’t be that bad, can it?_

Suffice it to say that Guillermo had never been near a body of water, much less jumped into one, and so his first impulse upon seeing the shimmering arcs of tourmaline blue on the surface of the pool was to leap into the deep end.

Because swimming couldn’t possibly be that hard, could it?

Could it?

Guillermo was pretty sure these sorts of things came instinctually to humankind.

(His 19-year-old self was also pretty sure there was nothing impulsive or questionable about quitting Panera Bread and dropping out of his first year at CUNY to become a full-time vampire familiar. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

Guillermo’s body swung through the air and seemed to him to hang there, suspended for a fraction of infinity, before his weight yanked him down and he sliced through the surface of the water in a straight shot toward the bottom. He was wrapped in a bubble of incredulity for several more seconds before the pain of the cold stabbed through his skin like a shard of ice. It bloomed, hard and fast, in the base of his spine and coursed up through his fingers and his toes. He couldn’t seem to close his eyes, no matter how much the chlorine burned his eyeballs, and in a cloud of slow motion, arms weighted down by the gentle menace of the waves around him, he struggled to pivot and find the surface. To find air, break free, find the light.

He found immediately that two things do not matter underwater: time, and panic. His heart, once beating erratically before his fateful dive from the sheer excitement of what he was about to do, now picked up its pace to a gallop that seemed fatally at odds with the frozen world around him. A flash of sunlight overhead pierced the water of the pool and refracted against the tiles several feet from him to blind him. His own blood thundered in his ears, deafening and silencing at once. 

He realized what an idiot he had been.

And that soon Vanesa and his mother and father and everybody above the surface of the water would be speaking of him in the past tense, because now his panic was choking him, and his first reflex was to open his mouth to draw a gasp of air. Bubbles erupted from his throat and water rushed in, bitter, scorching, unforgiving and cold. He flailed his arms and legs, but they, too, were tied back with anchors, moving at less than half the rate that his mind was flying.

He thought he might at least get a highlight reel in his brain of all his short twelve years on earth. Instead, his lungs betrayed him and he shuddered and gasped and clenched his body around the pain of the water filling him up, and the last thought to appear in his mind before he lost consciousness was that he wished he’d had more time.

How selfish, and naive, perhaps, but Guillermo de la Cruz was twelve years old and he’d never known happiness beyond his books and smiling down at the blood-red _A+_ on his English paper.

Guillermo came back to consciousness in a shroud of silence so laden that he felt he’d missed half a chunk of his life. His glasses were gone, and figures hovered over him in a haze that blocked out the sun behind them, vengeful and fiery on his skin for daring to come back to life.

The silhouette of Vanesa was the first one to choke out something between a gasp and a cry and squeeze Guillermo’s right hand even tighter than she already had, and fling herself across his chlorine-soaked chest.

Guillermo tried to speak. After several attempts, what he croaked out was, “Oh, no.”

And then the chatter of the adults who had fallen on their knobby knees onto the scorching cement around him sucked him back into the world in a rush. Somewhere, somebody was torn between sobbing and screaming in the background. He could’ve sworn his father was thanking the Virgin Mary somewhere from above his head.

“Memo! _Memo_!” his mother gasped. “What were you doing? Oh God--we thought--”

Guillermo’s head pounded and his nose stung like a bitch. Something warmer and thicker than water trickled down toward his upper lip, and reflexively he licked it up. Blood. Vanesa’s eyes widened and she hoisted him into a sitting position, grabbing the edge of his own water-logged shirt to stop up the bleeding.

His parents demanded answers, in part to know if he was all right and in part to understand why the fuck he had not called for help.

It turns out that nobody saw him jump. Nobody who admits to it, anyway. Guillermo had the niggling sense, as Vanesa pressed the hem of his shirt even harder against his nostrils and her hot, uneven breaths fanned across the side of his face, that she knew something that the others didn’t.

The lifeguard had been occupied with another family at the party who was teaching their four-year-old to tread with a floatie around her waist. Hector and Tía and Guillermo’s parents had been leaning against the open doorway of the pool entrance, drinks in hand, blinded by the slant of the sun and the visors of their sunhats. Vanesa was the only one close by enough to glance up a few minutes after Guillermo’s disappearance and seek out his shape in the pool. At that moment, as she tells everyone to this day, she only recognized him, facedown in the water and motionless, by the color of his shorts and the clang in her heart of foreboding.

“I’m sorry,” Vanesa told him as she rubbed his back in circles with the callouses of her palm. And then: “I’m so sorry,” she whispered again, even as Guillermo shook his head and plugged up his nose and assured her in a nasal tone that none of it was her fault.

\--

Though they only talk about it with other members of the family and not between themselves, both Guillermo and Vanesa know that something very, very wrong happened that afternoon.

Jason and Erica from the D&D group are the first ones to vote for Boy Who Lived as Guillermo’s new moniker following his reluctant explanation for why he gets random nosebleeds for a week after the pool incident. It feels nice, feels almost as if a broken compass is righting itself, when his mates crowd around him in Jason’s basement, all hooting and shaking their fists in celebration of his close brush with death.

But the incident at the pool leaves him with more questions than anyone his age would understand. And it is the beginning of his foray into the library to check out every book on the shelf on vampires and immortality.

\--

ii.

The nosebleeds stop just a little over a week after Guillermo’s near-drowning. He has a brief reprise with them in high school, the day he falls asleep while studying for his SATs while leaning against the open window of Erika’s treehouse and plummets some dozen feet to the frozen ground below. He doesn’t notice the blood immediately, though, not until he wakes up with a motherfucker of all headaches and limps into Erika’s bathroom, and there he catches a glimpse of the carmine drops in the sink as he washes his face and hands.

Blood on his lips and teeth is a pretty good look, he decides with a morbid sort of satisfaction. He bares his teeth and purrs at his reflection in the mirror.

“It is I, Guillermo the Swift-Fanged, and tonight will be your last night alive,” he intones dramatically.

He goes for a bat-like swoop of his arms, too, the integrity of which is utterly ruined by the fact that the baggy arms of his Moore Catholic High hoodie aren’t nearly majestic enough for the gesture.

He drops his arms back down to his sides with a huff of impatience. “Oh, who am I kidding,” he whispers furiously at himself, and goes back to scrubbing the dark tracks of coagulated blood from his upper lip.

In the end, he chalks up the nosebleed to pre-SAT stress. Or normal high school stress. Or all the other different fucking stresses that come with being a nerdy Chicano wannabe goth in his corner of the world.

After all, he somehow walked away from that stomach-hurtling fall without a broken bone. He and his parents’ woeful insurance plan should be glad of that. And if Erika discovers the next day that the bottom portion of her treehouse windowsill is somehow freshly splintered at the side, well--she doesn’t need to know the details.

\--

iii.

Contrary to popular belief, Nandor the Relentless is an excellent strategist. Of course he may be operating on somewhere below two brain cells’ capacity on a normal day--as Nadja and sometimes Laszlo are so inclined to remind him just as often--but Nandor can never be faulted with failing to strategize how to prolong the moments of contact between him and his familiar.

Oh, yes, the hair-brushing is a good trick that he thought of about a year into Guillermo’s service. A fine trick indeed.

So is the demand to wake up the excitable little human every evening and early morning to personally steady him with a hand as he gets in and out of his coffin.

But recently, Nandor has discovered the veritable witch’s miracle that is these things called Tide pens. Practical, functional, and absolutely rubbish at getting the task done efficiently: the perfect setup to have Guillermo spending even more time than necessary rubbing the blood stains off his delicate satin button-up shirt while he keeps it on with an imperial pose in the middle of his crypt.

(No, Guill _er_ mo, we do not have _time_ for you to take the shirt off me and wash it in your pitiful plastic tub! Now tide me up.)

Naturally, this new strategy on Nandor’s part brings with it the inconvenient need for Guillermo to go back and forth fetching new stock of Tide pens from the local drugstore every two weeks or so.

(“Master,” Guillermo attempts not once, not twice, but five separate times, “we really would save more money with the Tide bottles. They’re only thirteen cents an ounce.”)

(Nandor never grew up with these American ounces or unit prices. His scheme will not be thwarted, dammit.)

And so Guillermo finds himself trudging to and fro from the convenience store on odd days of the week, picking up items from his master’s increasingly ridiculous shopping list from unholy amounts of fake flowers to crepe paper (and construction paper, and tissue paper, and honestly all kinds of paper Guillermo didn’t know existed, much less has any idea what Nandor is doing with it) to entire boxes of Tide pens.

It’s on one such Thursday, a few weeks after Guillermo’s twenty-ninth birthday, that he steps off the sidewalk and onto the street with the plastic bag of goodies hanging from his fist. With his other hand he has his phone pressed to his ear, listening to Colin Robinson drone on about the environmental efficiency of having more state-sponsored scooters for public transportation around Staten Island, because frankly, taking Colin’s fourth missed call within the hour is more bearable than coming home to him vibrating with the anticipation of having your captive attention for his feeding. Listen, Guillermo agrees heartily with his points, but he still has no idea how they got to this point from Colin’s original request for a 3-by-5 lined notepad from the store.

“...I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, which is kinda funny, really, considering I do give you guys the frequent update on my civic engagement with the community, but recently I was attending another council meeting hosted at the local high school’s auditorium and somebody brought up the pretty nifty idea of incorporating those public bikes that are so popular up in Boston. Of course, the way the whole thing is implemented in Boston is based on a pay-per-go system, which could arguably disenfranchise people who don’t have access to those kinds of cards...so I stood up and gave the council a piece of my mind that this lady is on the right track but we could definitely use with some revamping of the concept. ID cards, anyone? We tote them around all day, every day, for seemingly no reason! So the newest councilman was a bit of a bitch about it…”

“Right,” says Guillermo. “Uh-huh. I hear you. You’re right. Yup.” He double-checks the contents of his shopping bag, makes a noise of satisfaction, and glances to his left down the street before breaking into a jog to cross over.

Several things happen all at once: the drone of Colin Robinson’s retelling of last night’s council meeting reaches an unnecessarily dramatic crescendo in his ear; a squirrel shrieks in the swaying branches of the skeletal elm across the street; and tires skid on the pavement too hot and too close to Guillermo to be able to process just what’s going on. Too late he whips his head to the right, and all he registers are the headlights blinding him with a searing white and a horn blasting at him in desperation. Then there’s a crumple and an impact, and he’s flying, and the phone is hurtling from his fingers into oblivion, and there’s the burn and crack of his fall on the razor-sharp asphalt.

The box of Tide pens goes sailing above him and scatters midair like cheap constellations. The back of Guillermo’s skull meets the road with an explosion of pain. The roar of the engine and the distant scream of whoever is behind the wheel are all-encompassing, and pain and more pain press down on him from all sides, till he can’t hear or see anything besides the spinning of the dull blue sky above him that makes no sense at all.

The last thing Guillermo thinks, rather on-brand and very bitterly, is that he doesn’t even have any fucking health insurance for this.

\--

Consciousness slams Guillermo in the gut like the gasp of a drowning man. 

A weight like a ten-ton stone flattens him by the chest, but something in him heaves vengefully to life, and he sucks in a breath with a gurgle and a choked-off cry.

Oh God.

Everything’s black. There’s voices around him, muffled through a layer of suffocation.

Oh God, oh God oh _God_.

His hands won’t move. His chest is moving, infinitesimally, and whatever air he can draw in this cramped space whistles through his nose. Through the mind-searing panic that scuttles through his skull, he forces himself to focus and find the tingle in his fingers that follows the numbness.

The warped image of the treehouse, the burning chlorine of the pool, flashes unbidden to the forefront of his mind.

Warmth. Moisture. Nosebleeds.

Guillermo instinctively licks his upper lip with his tongue, and the sting of copper, of blood, confirms everything in the sinking pit of his stomach.

Oh God.

All at once the energy zips back to his arms and fingertips. He reaches up and claws madly at the shroud of black around him, and his fingers soon find purchase on the rough line of the back of a zipper. He grabs, forces his fingernails in, _yanks_. And he jackknifes upright with another gasp and wild eyes.

“Holy _shit_!” shouts the EMT at his side. His partner on the other side of the gurney--the other side of the _body bag_ \--follows up with a well-deserved _holy fuck_ and stumbles backward over her boots to sag against the back of the open ambulance.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, oh God, I’m sorry,” Guillermo babbles. His knees are trembling. He wriggles out of the body bag and hops to his feet, feeling like his legs are a cross between jello and underbaked macaroons, and he repeats his litany of apologies as he bounces from one foot to another to restore circulation.

Pain shoots through his joints from the roots of his toes. He ignores it, instead pivoting his head from side to side wildly seeking the detritus of his phone and groceries.

“Sir! _Sir!_ You were--sir, please get back here! You were _dead_!”

“Not today, sorry!” Guillermo’s glasses are fucked. They’re half-crushed under the tire of the Subaru that ran him over, and they’re fucked. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. He’d rather walk home in a blur than with shards of polycarbonate sticking out of his face.

“What the fuck?” the other EMT whispers to himself, over and over.

“Sir, if you could just sit back down, _please_ , so we can give you a checkup and make sure you don’t have any life-threatening injuries--”

Life-threatening injuries, his ass. Guillermo lives with three, possibly four very life-threatening entities on a daily basis, thank you very much.

He bends down and with jerky movements manages to recover most of the things that rolled down the pavement and stuff them back into his shredded plastic bag. He straightens and squeaks out, “I’m really fine, and I’m sorry for not looking, please tell the driver to have a nice day and--I’ll get somebody to reach out and contact him about the bumper--oh God, I really have to go. Um. Consider this your lucky day?”

Should he wave? Is that too impertinent in a context like this? Guillermo waves anyway and walks backward away from the whole...clusterfuck that this was. Whatever the fuck it was that just happened.

He trips over his own heels--just his luck--and turns and jogs as fast as he can through the shooting pins and needles in his elbows and knees and spine to make his way back home.

\--

It’s nightfall by the time Guillermo slinks back into the house. True to form, Colin Robinson materializes in the doorway of the foyer with his hands in his pockets and his mouth open to express consternation.

“Not now, Colin,” Guillermo mutters, and makes his way briskly to his closet-room.

To be fair, Colin Robinson probably was genuinely concerned after the call dropped and he didn’t hear anything again from Guillermo for the next...he doesn’t know, hour? Two hours? Three? How fast can an ambulance get to him and load him up in a body bag in Staten Island? The mere consideration is too morbid for Guillermo to continue thinking about it without a shudder. But the other part of Guillermo suspects that Colin is just miffed that the familiar must have hung up on him and ghosted him for the entire afternoon, and with the internet trolls turning to other websites lately, Colin was left without his usual source to suck.

Once inside his room, Guillermo attempts to make quick work of changing out of his torn and bloodied outfit. He finds that everything throbs. He hisses as he tries pulling up his cardigan over his shoulders, and settles instead for pulling it apart without undoing the buttons. His fingers are too stiff and knobby from shock to do that.

His favorite button-up poses a similar problem. Oh, well. Seems he’ll have to lose that, too.

The best he can do is a loose-fitting sleeping shirt over his pants. Nandor will be wanting to wake up soon, and Guillermo can’t be late again.

After shucking off his shoes (one of which now has its outsole partially detached, thanks a lot, Subaru driver), he pads down the hallway straight for Nandor’s crypt and knocks on the lid of the coffin.

“Go away, Guillermo,” Nandor groans, sounding far too pouty and far too alert.

“Master, it’s almost seven. You told me to wake you up as early as possible tonight.”

Nandor growls half-heartedly from behind the lid. “...I said no such thing.”

Guillermo bites his lip and raises a look heavenward. They do this tango almost every evening. “Sorry, but you did, master. You said to specifically wake you up at six-thirty so you could get to work on your...uh...epic scrapbook.”

The lid slides open with a boom of its own accord. Guillermo jumps, and Nandor’s man-bun in which he’s taken to sleeping these days appears over the top of the coffin, royally mussed. “Then why didn’t you wake me up at six-thirty, Guillermo?!”

“Sorry,” Guillermo grimaces again. “There was a--slight complication running errands…”

“ _Guillermo_ ,” Nandor grumbles again, but with an entirely different tone to his italicized brand of speaking this time. He struggles out of his coffin with alarming independence and speed. “What is that on your face? Why are you--”

Guillermo already knows what his master is about to say. His eyes widen, and his hand flies up to meet the warmth trickling from his nose down to his lip. 

“Oh, God,” he says. Nandor hisses instinctually, and Guillermo flaps a hand at him by way of apology with a substituted “Oh Jesu--shit. Sorry, sorry.”

He flees the room, crashing in an uncoordinated tangle of shoulder and arms against the lintel on his way out, and beelines for the nearest bathroom. Upon flinging it open and finding Nadja inside, hissing at him for interrupting her blind hacking with a pair of scissors at her bangs, he yelps, shuts the door again, and finds the next washroom over.

Crap, so he forgot to stock up on tissues, too.

Sagging against the foot of the bathtub, he settles on destroying the neckline of his favorite sleeping shirt, too, to clean his face, because he’s pretty sure that mopping up his nosebleed with Laszlo’s handpicked brocade curtains from the sixteenth-century museum display in Paris isn’t going to fly in this household.

And then common sense hits him and he realizes he could have just turned on the tap and splashed water over his nose.

The thump of Nandor’s footfalls alerts him. Nandor raps at the door. “Guillermo? Have you been having the constipation again?”

“Really not a good time right now, master,” Guillermo calls through the door. Shit. He really doesn’t understand how he could have gone nearly ten years without bleeding in front of Nandor or the other vampires, all for his streak to be broken by a stupid run for Tide pens and Colin Robinson’s stupid phone call about stupid public scooters.

The door rattles, and Nandor must really be either blood-crazed or dumbly concerned for him if he’s not understanding the concept of unlocked doorknobs at this hour. Guillermo heaves a sigh, swipes his sleeve one last time over his nose, and pulls the door open.

“I’m fine, master. I just need to get cleaned up,” he says.

Nandor is regarding his crusted nose and the various blood smears on his shirt with a mixture of awe and, disturbingly enough, distaste.

“This is what happens when you eat your dry poops, yes?” he chastises him. “Very careless, Guillermo. I thought modern humans had schools where they teach you nutrition. And it’s so _unhygienic_. Now look what you’ve done, you’ll need to be using the new Tide pens.”

“Sorry, master,” Guillermo says, not sorry at all, but exhausted, battered and quite possibly sustaining some half-healed fractures in his joints, and utterly sick of this bullshit.

“Fucking guy,” Nandor says. His eye twitches. He pauses. “Make sure you eat something savory for the stomach, Guillermo.” And then he turns on his heel with his hands held gingerly before him, as if he’s just finished some invisible surgery, and stalks off down the hall in the direction of the sitting room.

\--

Right. So apparently Guillermo isn’t just the lucky Boy Who Lived to tell of his near-drowning incident. Apparently he can come back from the fucking dead, now, complete with arthritic joints and cliché nosebleeds like an overdramatic 80s teen horror protagonist.

“Fuck me,” he groans with a thump of his head against his windowsill.

He wonders if getting bitten and turned by a vampire would even take, now.

\--

(He does rather enjoy shooting Nandor dirty looks, though, and seeing the 758-year-old vampire quail before his bespectacled gaze for approximately one full week after he gets out of the hospital following the flying-and-dropping incident. After all, as far as his master is concerned, he’s as fragile and _mortal_ as the next big human baby.)

\--

iv.

Thoughts of pesky immortality are the furthest from Guillermo’s mind the moment he swings onto the stage of the Nouveau Théâtre des Vampires and rolls onto his knees to slash at the actor’s chest with the point of his silver dagger. All he could think of--crouched between the slats of the balcony up on the second floor backstage as Nandor floundered through his cover story of ripping his familiar from limb to limb and lamenting that his favorite familiar had walked out on him yet again--was the weight of the axe plummeting from the ceiling and slicing through the four necks waiting. The sound of four bodies, immobilized, disconnected from their heads, the roll of cool skulls on the floor, the thunderous roar of a vampire audience thirsty for death that is not their own.

And the thought consumes him of Nandor, face caught in a grimace, eyes never to alight again with mischief and mouth never to move with knowing half-smiles at him, and instinct barely needs to nudge Guillermo forward to seize the rope and hurl himself into certain pain and death.

He may know somewhere in the tangle of his mind that he’ll come back to life if he gets stabbed--maybe, probably, hopefully--but the prospect doesn’t diminish the threat of violent pain exploding in his body during impact. So he rolls and twirls, light on his feet, tosses stakes from hand to hand, launches weapons to and fro as his attackers converge on him in a wave of snarls and fangs. His fingers are swift as the wind when he yanks the cartridges of holy water and uncorks them with his teeth and flings them outward, spinning in circles. He basks with a morbid and vengeful satisfaction as the theater erupts into utter chaos: hellish screams, ghoulish cries, the sizzle and hiss of bodies meeting silver and wood and bursting into fountains of blood and ash.

“Get off him! Shoo!” That’s Nandor, voice shaky, but ever spunky and idiotic in his adorable way.

“The balls on that little chap,” Laszlo marvels, over the noise of Nadja singsonging and wincing in commiseration at the boiling impact of holy water with undead skin.

Guillermo’s feet and mind are on fire. He blazes through row after row of theater seats, eliminating targets with deadly efficiency and singeing the hand of a would-be attacker with the imprint of his backup crucifix.

“Behind you!” Nandor hollers.

Guillermo whirls. A single brandish of the rosary wrapped around his fist, and the remaining creatures of the night whimper and scamper for the door.

In the heaving of his chest and the patter of blood drops in the silence that ensues, Guillermo nearly doesn’t register the camera crew scrambling back to their feet to capture the aftermath of the gore.

Nandor’s voice warbles as he finally breaks the panting silence: “Guillermo?”

His familiar looks up. His fingers are still locked in a vise grip on the last splintered stake in his right hand.

“Is there something you haven’t been telling us?”

There’s an invitation, there, and Guillermo can read it loud and clear. He could joke about this, or he could slide back into his obsequious head-bow and rush over and help his master and roommates out of their silver binds. He could evade the question or ignore it entirely. These are the options, he thinks, that Nandor presumes he might take. So he shocks his own self along with everyone else in the room when he tosses the stake to one side, flexes his hand through the rivulets of coagulating blood running down it, and squares his shoulders and declares, loud and clear, “My name is Guillermo de la Cruz.”

The last burst of adrenaline thunders in his ears and nearly blocks out what happens next: Nadja’s little “Ahhh!” of realization, Laszlo’s _harrumph_ , Colin Robinson’s shit-eating little smile as he figures out the significance of Guillermo’s surname, and Nandor’s strident and ill-timed complaint about the goddamn laundry.

He didn’t take the bait from Nandor. He knew what his master was reaching out to him, and he rejected it. Now he’s falling, falling from the peak of his adrenaline and the high of his bloodthirsty moment, and he’s falling toward the void of the unknown. They’re all on uncertain ground.

None of them can get a proper read on him anymore, and the part of him that’s always longed for this and dreamed of seeing power in his reflection in the mirror--it vengefully rejoices.

His footsteps take him up the short distance to the four chairs on the stage. His knees knock against each other the whole time. He makes quick work of Colin’s bindings--something tells him he has the least to worry about from Colin as far as an adverse reaction is concerned--and Colin grins with a chirpy, “Thanks, dude! You know, silver cords don’t really hurt me. In theory, I could be bound by anything, really, especially if I haven’t been feeding too much recently, because ropes are ropes, y’know! But it’s the whole spirit of the gesture and the consistency of everything that gets me.”

“Colin Robinson, we have no time for this horse shit. Help us get out of these,” Nadja hisses at him.

“All right, all right, all in good time. Let a man stretch and get his circulation back.” Colin’s wink is disturbingly chipper for the context, but hey, Guillermo figures that different stones evolve in different ways under pressure.

Laszlo probably--definitely--cracks an uncalled-for jest under his breath at Colin’s pun. As Colin makes quick work of Nadja’s binds, Guillermo turns his attention to Nandor.

Nandor’s visage is inscrutable. Not too often has Guillermo caught his master at such an unreadable moment. He can count on his fingers the times it’s happened: Nandor slumping with his gaze unfocused after witnessing his great-great-great-something-granddaughter’s death; Nandor refusing to look up at Guillermo, but instead fixing his eyes on his fingernails, right after blurting out that he should take Celeste’s offer; and Nandor biting back a grimace and a smile as Guillermo moved in for a hug in the middle of the snowy street, in his blood-spattered post-orgy bathrobe, and Nandor had no idea how to react.

Still, something that stirs an uneven beat in Guillermo’s heart now is how Nandor seems incapable of tearing his gaze away from his familiar’s. Their eyes meet, and it scorches Guillermo in various ways he can’t describe. But he can’t look away. He fumbles with Nandor’s ropes in the process, taking far longer than Colin with Nadja and Laszlo, but Nandor doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t rush him.

When they all are finally free, Nandor shakes his wrists and stands with a dignified kind of uncertainty that Guillermo wouldn’t have expected of him, but frankly he shouldn’t be surprised by. There are moments like these, when more than seven centuries of mundane immortality cave before Nandor’s instinct to slide back into the stance of a fearsome warlord.

“I’ll get the car,” Guillermo says quietly. “We--we really need to get out of here.”

“Good call,” Laszlo concurs. “This place could be crawling with vampires again in the blink of an eye. Colin Robinson, old chap, why the fuck didn’t you know this was the doing of the Vampiric Council?”

\--

Colin and Guillermo have a brief spat over who’s driving home. Set aside _if_ they’re still going home after this. Guillermo relents eventually, because everyone shoots each other knowing looks that he’s about ten seconds away from keeling over, and besides--they’re being pursued by vampires who couldn’t even dream of entering their Staten Island house without first being invited in. 

Still, Guillermo insists on taking the front passenger seat, tense as a bowstring as he alternates his gaze between the rearview mirror, the side mirror and windshield ahead in a clockwork. Vampires may make no reflections, but he’s bound to sense something if there’s still someone on their tail.

Colin Robinson seems to have the decency to keep his mouth shut, at least, and not drain the one passenger in their midst with the capacity to stake ten vampire assassins in the span of a minute.

\--

Guillermo doesn’t know how he ended up in his bed under the stairs. He blinks up through crusted lids with a groan sometime hours later, body sore all over in places he didn’t even know existed, and he finds he has no recollection of what happened between the car ride over the bridge and now.

He forces his eyes open. Light streams gently through the newspaper strips pasted to his window. His throat is sandpaper and his brain is a Rubbermaid bin of rocks.

They haven’t killed him.

Of course, there is always the possibility that they did kill him and didn’t know that he can come back to life, anyway, like an irritating and ironic little nine-lived mosquito. But Guillermo, in his half-woken haze, highly doubts they’d just leave his corpse around the house if they really detested him so much for his...supernaturally homicidal tendencies.

So, all in all, Guillermo decides they definitely haven’t killed him, and that that’s definitely a win for him.

Somehow he finds the strength to creak upright and shuffle out of his closet. Someone divested him of the crimson-drenched trench coat and sweater and trousers, and put him in unwashed pajamas from his hamper.

He makes it down the hallway in a swirl of incoherence. Hushed voices rise and fall from behind the door to the fancy room.

Fucking Nandor and the fancy room. Guillermo _knows_ they hold all their house meetings in there, goddammit.

“...Fragile. We can’t expect him to keep us safe from all of them.”

“Did you see the bloody stunts he pulled last night? That bugger has got the feet of a deer on him, I swear. I don’t doubt he’s capable of more. Maybe there’s something to him outlasting all the other familiars, Nandor. There’s something to it. Mark my words.”

“But, my darling, Nandor is right. He’s just a tiny fragile human. Take away his pointy sticks and anyone could sink their fangs in his delicious neck and then--” Nadja makes a very illustrative noise in the back of her throat, miming exsanguination to a painful level of accuracy.

“This is all operating under the assumption that Guillermo would, in fact, be caught without any weapons on him,” Colin interjects.

Oh, great. Even the energy vampire is invited to this meeting about him, _without_ him.

“Did you notice all those bandoliers on him? The little man came _prepared_. Who’s to say he doesn’t sleep with one eye open and a rosary around his neck? Or a stake strapped to his leg?”

Guillermo finds himself instinctively seeking out the nearest camera to cast it an unsettled look worthy of _The Office_. There are no cameras, of course. The fact remains that he does, in fact, sleep with a rosary in one hand and a stake strapped to his ankle.

“No, no, no, we cannot risk that. Nadja is right,” Nandor says pensively. “It is painful to leave this beautiful house of horrors, but we must search for a new lair as soon as possible.”

Guillermo huffs. Then he squares his shoulders and barges straight in.

“What all of y’all need to be doing is getting to _bed_ as soon as possible,” he gripes.

“Hey!” Nandor whines out of habit. “Vampire-only meeting, Guillermo!”

“Gizmo! Man of the hour! Er, night!” Laszlo greets him boisterously.

“Sorry, darling,” Nadja says with a grimace up at him from where she’s lounging on the chaise by the bay window.

“Seriously, guys!” Guillermo throws up his hands. “You’re all sitting directly in front of the fucking window. How do we know the Vampiric Council doesn’t have some daywalker working for them who could very easily, oh, I don’t know, _break the fucking windows_ and burn you all to a fucking crisp?”

“I am very sorry for being so concerned for your wellbeing that we could not sleep a wink,” Nandor says crossly. He flaps his hand around in sass. The nerve on him.

Guillermo seethes. “Go. To. _Bed_.”

“Right,” Laszlo drawls slowly. “I personally have no interest in becoming Cravensworth the immortal dust bunny, so I’d do as the chap says. Toodles, everyone, and good night. Nadja, my love?”

Nadja’s face is still caught somewhere between a gorgeous grimace and an apology. She sweeps to her feet to join her husband, stopping only to hesitate as she passes Guillermo, and then pat his shoulder awkwardly with her red-varnished claws. Then the two rustle away to their crypt, leaving Guillermo sagging in the doorway in front of Colin Robinson perched on the arm of a chair and Nandor with his head in his hand on the couch.

An uncomfortable beat passes, and then Colin says mildly, “Well, technically I don’t need to sleep, but last night’s adventures were quite enough excitement for me. I’m calling in sick at work. Er...have fun, guys. Keep it PG.” 

(What the fuck, Colin.)

He slinks off in the direction of the basement.

“Jesus,” Guillermo breathes, all the air leaving him all at once.

Nandor’s answering growl is a half-hearted rumble.

“Nandor,” Guillermo says quietly.

The sound of his name on Guillermo’s tongue makes Nandor’s head jerk up. His hair is undone, his eyes wild to those who know how to read him well.

“Go to bed,” Guillermo says. “Please. I’ll be fine.”

Even as the words leave his mouth, he sways on his feet. Nandor moves fluidly to stand and approach him at the same time that Guillermo trips a little over his toes and makes it to the coffee table. Nandor hesitates, too, just like Nadja did, before touching his arm to grip it and steady Guillermo as the human sinks with a bone-tired sigh onto the table.

“You must sleep, too, you stupid idiot,” Nandor says with unexpected venom. 

Guillermo scoffs. “Then who’ll cover for our asses?”

“Do not disobey me in this, Guillermo.”

“You can’t--don’t.” Guillermo shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. Ugh, he’s misplaced his glasses again. “We’re not like that anymore. Nandor.”

The vampire gives a full-body flinch at the second mention of his name.

A part of Guillermo deigns to sympathize with Nandor. After all, he’s lived all his human life with armies at his fingertips, surging forward on the battlefield at his beck and call, and the latter seven centuries and a half have spoiled him with powers of compulsion and hypnosis and death. Nandor is used to being the one in the room who knows best, and everyone else beneath him agreeing.

So Guillermo softens his tone and pleads, from behind his hands over his face: “I’ll go back to bed soon, Nandor. You need to sleep before somebody seriously breaks the windows, though. I’ll just do a perimeter check and then rest, too.”

Nandor makes a noise of assent, appeased.

When neither of them move, Nandor says in that uncertain singsong way of his, when he’s unsure of where they stand with each other: “Guill _er_ mo. How can you do the checking of the perimeter if you are not moving?”

“In a minute,” Guillermo groans.

“I will go when you go.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Guillermo mumbles. He wobbles back to his feet and faces his former master. “Happy now?”

“Overjoyed,” Nandor deadpans. “Guillermo, make sure you eat one of your soups that are canned. You are starting to look a little gray around the corners and that won’t do.” He claps his hands. “Okay. All right. Good night.”

He lifts his hands as if he’s about to pat Guillermo’s shoulders--what is it with everybody and their weird need to touch him _now_ , of all days?--but thinks better of it and simply nods and sweeps out of the room with a swoosh of his rumpled cape.

Guillermo rolls his eyes after Nandor’s retreating silhouette. “It’s called Campbell’s, and I stopped eating those because they’re full of toxins,” he mutters.

“I heard that, Guillermo.”

“I know!”

“ _Eat_.”

“ _Sleep_.”

\--

In hindsight, Guillermo probably should have taken Nandor’s (usually questionable but sometimes right) advice and heated up a boxed dinner first before conducting the perimeter check.

Still, he can’t be blamed. He’s running on fumes and anxiety, more than any other day, and he’s a vampire slayer and he has two stakes strapped to his wrist and he’s a goddamn _immortal_. His own peril is the furthest thing from his mind.

So when the shadow leaps behind him where he trudges slowly around the backyard, and the knife plunges deep into the space between his ribs, he doesn’t register a thing except the shock and the cold of the blade until it’s too late.

The shadow vanishes, and Guillermo sways to and fro on his feet, gaping at the hilt of the dagger protruding from his flesh, and barely has time to wrap his fingers around the handle before he lurches forward and darkness pulls him swiftly under.

\--

Colin Robinson finds him three hours later.

He doesn’t recall the time he ever really felt pain over the passing of anyone, but stumbling over the limp carcass of the kid you’ve grown to regard with an unwilling and exasperated fondness over the past decade can really fuck you up.

He stands there, unable to register what he’s seeing, transfixed by the macabre silhouette of the hilt sticking out of the body’s side, before he finds the voice to start shouting Nandor’s and Nadja’s and Laszlo’s names.

Overhead, a leaf from the gnarly lightning-struck maple tree detaches and pirouettes to the ground. Guillermo never did get the chance to get around to the raking.

\--

Nandor was vociferous about his grief the night Matilda died. He blamed himself, bothered Guillermo about his icky feelings, upbraided his roommates for their apparent callousness, and urged them all loudly to enter the abominable house of the Jeebus man to attend to her mourning.

Now he is silent and still inside the house, and frankly, Nadja has never in the two centuries that they’ve been roommates seen the man this ghostly before. 

Colin came clattering inside, yelling at them to get the _fuck_ out of their coffins, and Nandor emerged from his crypt with the wild-haired speed of someone who had barely been sleeping in the first place. The other two popped their heads out their door with an alarming gravity, no doubt nonplussed by the unprecedented urgency in Colin Robinson’s voice.

The look that flashed across Nandor’s features the instant he swept down the hallway and saw the telltale signs of sunlight through the shades over the front door is a look that will likely be seared in Nadja’s memory.

 _He loved him_ , she thinks, slack-jawed. _In a very strange and incomprehensible way, he loved him_.

She remembers the first time Gregor was beheaded. Keeping this memory solidly in the center of her chest, she approaches Nandor from behind and touches him in the small of his back. He is stone, immobile, all fury and grief frozen in place beneath the rustle of his shirt.

“I told him to do the checking of the perimeter,” Nandor says in a very odd voice. The kind of voice that tells Nadja that he’s trying to say something else: _I could have turned him. I could have solved his human fragility so many years ago. Then he would not have been out in the sunlight--he would have been inside here with us--and I would have been able to protect him_.

 _I did not protect him_.

And it is the last thing he says for a long, long time.

\--

They don’t want to wait until nightfall to bury the body. They can’t wait. It’s half past eleven in the fucking morning and waiting the seven hours for it to get dark again all strikes their godless hearts as sacrilegious, whether or not they learned to love him.

But Colin Robinson reminds them that it would be useless to drag his body inside the house and then back out again, so they all perch in various dens around the mansion, lost in their thoughts as the sun cuts its agonizing path across the sky till twilight.

\--

“He was a great familiar,” Colin Robinson starts off in his nasal uncertainty, once the rough rectangular pit has been dug in the center of the backyard and Guillermo’s body rolled into it. They’re all rubbish at digging graves. The expert among them lies here dead, after all.

Nandor’s mouth twitches as if in disagreement. Something binds his tongue still, so Nadja takes on the role of speaking for them all: “Not a familiar any longer, I don’t think.”

“Quite right,” says Laszlo. “I don’t know what the fuck he was at the end--yesterday--last night--after everything that went down, but, hey...I think he was almost a friend.”

“A very vicious one,” Nadja adds with a judicious nod. “Never thought he’d have it in him. When he wasn’t dusting my skulls with the rough end of the feathers, I actually rather liked him.”

“Well, he certainly didn’t keel over or get fanged in the jugular after a year like all the others did, darling.”

Nadja wrings her hands. “This is very true. There was some steel in him. What a funny thing for a human to have. He...he would have made a great vampire.”

Nandor flinches. He lowers himself into a squat, making eye contact with none of his roommates around him, and covers his mouth as he touches the crumbling loam with his other hand.

“Well, I know you guys don’t normally say ‘rest in peace,’ considering that the expression usually implies some kind of understanding of an afterlife that’s heavily entrenched in Judeo-Christian tradition…” Colin drones. Everyone reverts to tuning him out in tandem. 

“...But at the end of the day, he did stake a lot of vampires for the sake of our sorry behinds, so ‘rest in peace’ it is for you, buddy. You deserve it. And, uh, we’ll definitely try to stay alive for you.” With that, Colin picks up a fistful of soil in his gloved hand and flings it onto the center of Guillermo’s chest.

Everybody starts out taking turns tossing in dirt and passing around the shovel, until Nadja and Laszlo, touched as they may be by the passing of their unwillingly favorite sort-of-borrowed-familiar, give up the task with a grumble and leave Colin Robinson to close the grave. Dirt sprays over Nandor’s head as the earth slowly swallows up Guillermo. He doesn’t budge from his crouch until the other three are long gone and the moon has risen to the peak of the night sky.

\--

Guillermo is swimming in darkness.

It’s suffocating him with an awareness and a panic that has never struck him this viciously before. He struggles to open his eyes, but even his body doesn’t seem to know where his eyes are, much less his limbs, only that he is a disembodied entity somewhere in the--somewhere in the _between_. He’s somewhere neither here nor there, and if he could only figure out where _here_ and _there_ are, then maybe the fright spreading cold and deadly from the space between his ribs would stop.

Hours, eternities pass, and then slowly, slowly, he becomes aware of something soft and cool around him. It’s crumbly, and it presses into him with more pressure than he previously estimated when he twitches his hands up to move it.

He still can’t open his eyes, but his lungs shudder back to life. Instantly his mouth fills with the taste of death and the stench of soil submerges him.

Dirt. _Dirt_.

Oh, God, he’s underground. He’s buried in the ground, fucking buried _alive_.

Panic sets in for real and seizes his bones. Stiff, frantic, he waves his arms in whatever space he’s afforded. The ceiling of dirt weighs down on his chest and seems to crumble further, crushing him, and he nearly dies all over again from his lungs having a seizure alone.

Moments later, instinct kicks in. He renews his efforts to scrape at the soil surrounding him. He pushes through the nausea and the disgust clinging to every inch of his skin. At last, at long last, his right hand bursts through to the surface, and he waves it around, tasting the bite of the November wind for the first time on his fingertips. He claws--scratches--and his other hand bursts through. With a herculean effort, he leverages himself up, spitting dirt and pebbles everywhere, and in a haze of numbness and pain commingled he climbs the fuck out of his own grave.

\--

A scream erupts from the fancy room the moment Guillermo crashes through the front door.

Nadja stands on the threshold to the foyer, teacup of blood in hand. The china slips from her fingers and shatters on the hardwood floor.

“I am _not_ cleaning that up,” is the first thing Guillermo says.

Which, ouch. Now that he’s attempted to speak, he feels like there are nails embedded in his throat. He’s parched, so parched, like he will die all over again if he doesn’t get any water into him right now.

Laszlo whizzes to his wife’s side. “Holy fucking shit!” And then: “Nandor! _Nandor_! Where the bloody fuck are you?” And then again, this time to Guillermo: “Now what the bloody fuck are _you_?”

“Out of the way!” Nandor pushes through the bodies crowding the foyer. Upon laying eyes on Guillermo, leaning heavily against the console, dirt smeared down his cheeks and through his hair and across his sweater and a veritable knife still sticking out of the side of his chest, Nandor almost blanches.

“Guillermo…? No. No! You are a ghost! Are you a ghost?”

“He’s got a fucking heartbeat,” Nadja screeches.

“A zombie? Who did this to you? Are you like Topher?”

“Topher didn’t have a fucking heartbeat,” says Laszlo. “Thanks to Wallace and his piss-poor slant rhyme--”

Nadja puts up a hand in his face. “Yes, yes, we all know this already. May the poor soul of Topher be at rest in...zombie afterlife.”

“’M not--a zombie,” Guillermo croaks out. “Water. Please.”

Nandor whirls and returns in less than a few seconds, unwashed glass in his shaking hand, filled to the brim with tepid tap water.

Guillermo gulps it down greedily. A wave of nausea overtakes him again, and he has barely enough wherewithal to slam the glass down on the console before doubling over with his hands on his knees.

Nandor makes a noise of distress and grabs him by the shoulder with one hand. With the other, he grasps the hilt of the knife and yanks it out in one fluid motion.

Guillermo gasps and wheezes. Oh, that feels better.

“Why--the fuck--didn’t you pull that out earlier?” he demands.

Nandor’s gaze bounces guiltily between the ornate weapon in his hand and the sweat-sheened face of his ex-familiar. “I was...you are taught explicitly not to pull the dagger out if there is no exit wound, Guillermo.”

“Yeah, well, that’s unless the guy is _dead_.”

“ _Guillermo_!” Nandor chastises him. “You gave us--you gave us quite a scare!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, but did I have to be buried in the next _ten minutes_?”

At Guillermo’s outburst, Laszlo and Nadja clamor in protest at once. “I say, chap, you’ve got to give us some credit--”

“--Colin Robinson found you when it was morning! We waited the whole night to bury you!”

“--And a proper burial it was, too! I haven’t put my extemporaneous speaking skills to test like that in ages. You should have been there!”

Guillermo lets the last couple of pants for breath blow through him. Straightening, he dusts off his sweater and points out, “I _was_ there. And if you’d pulled out the knife earlier, I would’ve woken up, too.”

“Colin Robinson, the idiot,” Nandor hisses. “Fucking guy.”

“Now hold up. Hold the fuck up. How do you know you would have woken up, Giz--Guillermo?”

Nandor and Guillermo simultaneously still at that.

“I--” Guillermo offers a round gesture. Flaps his hands uselessly. “I...it’s happened before.”

In the silence that elapses, Nandor reaches forward without warning and presses his palm to Guillermo’s chest, dirt and blood and all.

“What?” says Guillermo, as Nandor withdraws his hand with a pensive look.

“Your heart. I had to make sure that I was hearing correctly,” Nandor says softly.

And then, _then_ he lifts his eyes to meet Guillermo’s head-on, and Guillermo almost swoons from the vertigo of their gazes interlocking. Something is raging in Nandor’s eyes with a life that has never quite been there before. An epiphany, a quiet coming home: to the realization that he loves Guillermo.

“Out,” says Nandor, just barely raising his voice. But something in the shift in his demeanor must have alerted his roommates, because Laszlo and Nadja don’t need to be told twice. He’s barely spoken the word, and both vampires are already down the hallway.

“Nandor?” says Guillermo.

“Shut up, Guillermo,” Nandor says, with a swirl of fierceness, and then he has both hands out and he’s grabbing the sides of Guillermo’s face and bringing him closer until their mouths are mashed together in a kiss.

Guillermo’s stomach swoops and his heart--his fragile, tireless heart that keeps coming and coming back to life--leaps into his throat and lodges there. Every nerve ending and every cell in his being seems to crackle with electricity.

He barely realizes the little moan he’s making, and simply closes his eyes and reaches up to latch onto Nandor’s hands around his face for dear life, and moves even closer to deepen the kiss.

He’s wanted this. He’s yearned for this, in the back doors of his dreams and the shadowed corners of his waking.

But never once has he thought it possible.

Nandor pulls back just a fraction to let him breathe, and meets Guillermo’s tiny gasp for air with a growl of “Guillermo, you idiot,” and dives back in.

They stumble forward with Guillermo losing balance in the giddiness of it all. Nandor walks them backward until his back hits the paneling under the stairway, sending the door to Guillermo’s room open with a bang. Guillermo trips into him, and this time Nandor’s hand lowers to grab him around the waist and keep him steady as they make out against the wall.

Guillermo has no idea what’s happening anymore. He’s swimming, spinning, flying, possibly. Some part of him is falling--has always been, he realizes now. Falling for Nandor, hard and fast, without end.

Nandor jerks back suddenly. “Guillermo! What is that?”

“Huh?” Guillermo blinks and reluctantly comes back to reality. Nandor is staring at his lips with a combination of undisguised hunger and trepidation. Only then does Guillermo realize the sting of copper on his mouth, and he licks it up reflexively.

“Oh. _Oh_.” He huffs out a breathless laugh. “Sorry, master. Just a nosebleed. It happens every time I come back from the dead.”

He doesn’t seem to catch himself falling back into calling Nandor _master_ , but the vampire certainly didn’t miss it, if the ensuing twinkle in his eye is anything to go by.

“Yes, well, it is not very hygienic and doesn’t quite fit the mood right now, so here, clean it up,” says Nandor. The gentleness with which he presents Guillermo with an embroidered black handkerchief belies the familiar exasperation in his voice.

Guillermo takes the hanky without a word, balls it up in his hand, and stuffs it into his nostrils. He grins at Nandor. Nandor grins back, unguarded, fangs and all. Their lips are swollen and their eyes drunken with the moment.

It’s easy. For the first time, it’s easy, and it’s them.

“Guillermo,” Nandor speaks again, like his ex-familiar is being particularly naughty. “How long have you known about this coming back from the dead thing?”

Guillermo balks. “Uh. Since around my birthday last year. You, uh, sent me out for Tide pens and I got hit by a car.”

“ _Guillermo_!” Nandor scolds him, as if it’s in any way, shape or form his fault. “How often has this been happening? Is this like the stories of the cats with their nine lives?”

Guillermo shrugs helplessly. “...I’ve just always assumed since then that I’m...kind of...unkillable?”

“Yes, yes, but so are cats, until they hit their ninth life. How many lives do you have left?” Nandor squints.

Guillermo readjusts the wad of hanky in his nose and starts counting on his fingers. Nandor eyes his hands with a grimace of apprehension.

“...That depends,” says Guillermo.

“Depends? Depends on what?”

“Did I die at the hospital when you dropped me while we were flying, or was I alive the whole time?”

Nandor bares his teeth. “I don’t know! They had beeping machines that said your sad little heart was still going!”

“...About that, my friends,” Laszlo’s voice calls unmistakably from his and Nadja’s crypt. “Guillermo might have flatlined once or twice that night.” A beat of silence. “Give or take.”

“Well, shit,” says Guillermo mildly, pulling out the hanky and rearranging it to check for another dry spot. “Guess that puts me at five lives down.”

“Yeesh,” says Nandor. “Next time, let me do the checking of the perimeters, please, Guillermo. We cannot afford to be having so many fake burials and Colin Robinson weeping like a maiden. It’s very…” Nandor taps Guillermo’s nose. “Unnecessary.”

“I could actually be immortal, y’know,” Guillermo says conversationally and a little muffled around the hanky. “It would probably explain why I can’t seem to die when every other familiar in this house has.”

“Yes, well, we shouldn’t test that.”

“Yeah, probably,” says Guillermo. “So we’ll probably have to do something about the assassins soon.”

“Probably,” Nandor agrees. “Let’s keep kissing first.”

He flings the balled-up handkerchief away from Guillermo’s nose, cups his face again, and goes in for another kiss.

“Yeah, okay,” Guillermo mumbles against his lips.

This is okay. It’s more than okay. Guillermo reeks of sweat and graves and death, probably, and Nandor hasn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours, but it’s all okay.

They can think about all of that later. For now, Guillermo’s more than content to keep making out with Nandor.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, while writing this fic: it’s been disturbingly easy to nail nandor’s voice in this. is it–-am I really secretly just a 2-braincelled himbo deep down inside?  
> My buddy QueenBoudicatheGreat: yes. yes you are  
> Me: Validated™ like a goddamn parking ticket  
> QueenBoudicatheGreat: You just asked if you were a himbo and I had to stop in the middle of a text to immediately agree
> 
> ANYWHO this is my first posted fic for wwdits and I hope you derived some laughs and enjoyment from it!! What did you think of the concept? Thoughts? Reactions? Incoherent feelings?? More importantly: if I make this verse loosely into a series, what other ideas/headcanons do you wanna see?
> 
> Thank you for reading!! <3 -kaleb
> 
> My socials:  
> tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> insta: kc.barrie  
> wattpad (original works): kalebbarrie


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